About Starting A Vegetable Garden
Grow your favorite vegetables in your own backyard. Whether you have acres to plant or just a few containers, it is easy for almost anyone to start and maintain a productive vegetable garden.
Vegetable gardening requires good, deep soil with a mix of clay, sand and silt called loam that holds nutrients well and drains excess water. Test the soil before planting.
5 things to do in the garden this week:
1. This is bulb-ordering time and maybe you want to focus on fragrant flowers that grow from them. Freesia, a South African native that overwinters as a bulb-like corm is probably the most fragrant flower in this category. Freesias with white flowers – especially the Freesia Heirloom Antique Alba cultivar – are the most powerfully fragrant, followed by those with yellow blooms. Flowers in bronze, red, blue, or purple are less fragrant. Since Freesias are native to a sub-tropical climate, they do not require refrigeration prior to planting. Their longevity as cut flowers is legendary. If you cut Freesia flower stems as soon as flower buds appear and put them in a vase, you will see flowers open and remain fresh over a three-week period. Paperwhite narcissus, jonquils, and hyacinths are bulb flowers also noted for their sweet aromas.
2. A non-chemical method for controlling weeds employs blistering heat as a killing tool. This technique is especially effective on sidewalk and driveway weeds, or large weed patches where nothing else grows. You would probably not want to utilize this to eliminate weeds that grow in close proximity to desirable plants. What is it? It’s boiling water. You simply boil water in a tea kettle and pour it over the offending weeds.
3. As fire season approaches in Southern California, those living in areas prone to wildfires may want to consider the “Miracle House” of Lahaina, the city that virtually burned to the ground in the recent wildfires that visited the island of Maui. The single house still standing in its Lahaina neighborhood is surrounded by a three-foot wide swath of river rock (and it also has a metal roof). Not only is the area free of plants which, no matter how fire resistant, will incinerate in a major conflagration, but river rock is not easily crossed by surrounding flames. If you have a lawn around your home, water it well because allowing it to dry out makes it highly combustible. In this same vein, you never want to lay down mulch closer than five feet to your home since it is highly flammable and provides ready fuel for an encroaching fire. You may not wish to utilize river rock as a fire barrier because it is costly. However, gravel is much less expensive and will have the same fire deterrent effect. You can learn how much gravel you need for a three-foot-wide strip around your home by accessing the gravel calculator at omnicalculator.com/construction/gravel. You can then order it from a building materials or sand and gravel supply company.
4. Broadly speaking, any vegetable whose edible portion is roots (beets, radishes, carrots, turnips), leaves (lettuces, cabbages, chard, kale, arugula, endives, parsley and most herbs), or flowers, flower stalks, or flower buds (broccoli or cauliflower, asparagus,and Brussels sprouts) may be planted now. As for flowers, sow those that sprout easily from seed such as alyssum, love-in-a-mist, bachelor’s buttons, California poppies and many other native seeds, calendula, baby blue eyes, and Oriental poppies.
5. Plant peas now. Edible peas are of three types. English peas, the ones you buy frozen in the grocery store, can be eaten raw once they plump, although their pods are not edible; they are the fastest growing of the three types, with some varieties ready only 50 days after planting. Snow peas have flat edible pods and are harvested before the peas inside begin to swell. They are the type of peas you cook in stir-fry dishes and take twice as long as English peas to mature when planted from seed. Sugar snap peas are hybrids between the other two types and are harvested just after the peas inside the pods begin to swell. They are the sweetest of the three types and are popularly eaten out of hand straight from the vine. They require six to eight weeks to develop from seed to harvestable crop.
For more information about area plants and gardens, go to Joshua Siskin’s website, thesmartergardener.com. Send questions and photos to Joshua@perfectplants.com.
Source: ocregister.com
